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Francisco Yirá Albornoz
Data scientist and economist
Data scientist, bachelor of economics, and highly skilled R programmer. I have experience using machine learning to solve business problems in retail and marketing/CRM, answering business questions through statistical modelling and causal inference, and automating processes and reports.
I am passionate about enabling data-driven decision making and use data to solve problems and generate social impact. I like challenges and I am eager to learn more and share knowledge with others
Formal Education
University of Chile, Faculty of Economics and Business
Diploma in Applied Econometrics
Santiago, Chile
2021 - 2020
10-month program covering experimental design, causal inference with observational data and time series analysis.
Pontifical Catholic University of Chile, Faculty of Engineering
Diploma in Big Data
Santiago, Chile
2018 - 2017
144-hour program covering the fundamentals of machine learning, recommender systems, Hadoop, parallel computing and graph theory.
University of Chile, Faculty of Economics and Business
B.S. in Economics
Santiago Chile
2015 - 2010
Graduated with distinction. 5-year program.
Professional Experience
Data Scientist, Marketing
WOM S.A. (Telecommunications)
Santiago, Chile
2021 - 2020
- Used interpretable modeling techniques and unsupervised learning to guide the prioritisation of network infrastructure deployments. The resulting insights were made available to stakeholders via interactive reports, using packages such as
flexdashboardandplotly. - Trained predictive models with the ML framework H2O to better target potential customers through call centre campaigns.
- Performed impact evaluations of network investments using A/B testing, differences in differences, and matching.
Data Scientist, Marketing
Walmart (Retail)
Santiago, Chile
2019 - 2018
- Developed data transformation processes and implemented machine learning models that allowed the deployment of a personalized marketing strategy for the company’s most important local brand. This included the development of churn models and clustering on transactional data.
- Led the development of an internal R package aimed at streamlining processes and accelerating deliveries in our area.
- Introduced the use of version control and unit tests to the team.
Data Analyst, Marketing
Walmart (Retail)
Santiago, Chile
2018 - 2017
- Gave answers to business questions from Walmart merchants and the marketing team by integrating multiple data sources with R and SQL, and by applying statistical modelling, econometrics and data visualisation techniques.
- Automated ad-hoc reports by using parametrised R Markdown documents.
- Improved the impact evaluation of key company decisions by incorporating causal inference methodologies in otherwise descriptive analyses.
Trainee, Public Sector Sales team
Oracle (Software and IT)
Santiago, Chile
2017 - 2015
- Supported my sales team by automating reports with VBA.
- Kept track of sales opportunities KPIs.
- Demoed Oracle products to government clients.
- Developed a market study about innovative ways to sell Oracle products.
Projects and additonal coursework
Shiny app deployed on AWS tracking the Twitter presence of Chilean constituents
Self-learning project
N/A
2022
- An app built with R’s
shinyand deployed to AWS EC2 that automatically retrieves and visualises the most liked and RT’d tweets from the Chilean politicians who drafted the 2022 constitution proposal.
Causal Inference with R (blog posts series)
Self-learning project
N/A
2022
- A series of articles in which I explain key causal inference concepts and methodologies in simple terms and with lots of code examples and visualisations.
Analysing my music collection with Python and R
Self-learning project
N/A
2021
- An analysis I did to practice Python skills. It involved importing and transforming XML data and performing data wrangling and visualisation.
- I also combined Python and R code through the
reticulatepackage to leverage the R visualisation capabilities on top of thepandasdata pipeline.
Data collection for a survey of higher education institutions
Ministry of Education, Chilean government
Santiago, Chile
2020
- Developed R scripts to automatically create custom forms for each higher education institution, and then consolidated the completed forms into a single dataset by using Python scripts.
BI Dashboards development
KMA Asset (Real estate investment trust)
Santiago, Chile
2017
- Developed R scripts to automatically consolidate data from multiple CRM sources.
- Developed dashboards in Power BI on top of that data to enable analysis and monitoring of business metrics (conversion KPIs, customer acquisition cost, etc).
Publications and Presentations
alicer: An internal R package to accelerate Walmart Chile analytics
LatinR: Latin American Conference on the Use of R in Research + Development.
N/A
2019
Presentation on our success case at Walmart developing R packages to accelerate workflows in the marketing analytics team.
Have America’s political parties lost control over their presidential nominations? (Spanish)
University of Chile’s academic repository.
N/A
2017
Undergraduate thesis for Economics major. A statistical analysis of the factors that drive presidential nominations in the US political system, expanding on ’The Party Decides’ (M. Cohen, 2008) by leveraging new data and the Chow structural break test.
Languages
English
Fluent. IELTS Band 8.0.
N/A
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Spanish
Native speaker.
N/A
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French
Basic user (A2).
N/A
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